Mapbender


Mapbender is a graduated project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. It was awarded OGC web site of the month in 2008. It is used by PortalU and several federal states to implement the INSPIRE regulation. Many municipalities use Mapbender as City Map Services and it is used as the mapping framework for online cycle route planners.

Introduction

Mapbender is a web mapping software implemented in PHP and JavaScript, the configuration resides in a data model stored in a PostgreSQL PostGIS or MySQL database. It is developed as an open-source project and licensed by the GNU GPL as free software. Mapbender is a framework for managing spatial data services that are standardized following the OGC specifications OWS, WMS and WFS and using the formats GeoRSS and GML and Web Map Context. The framework implements user management, authentication and authorization. Management interfaces for user, group and service administration are stored as configurations in the database.
The software is used to display, overlay, edit and manage distributed Web Map Services. The maps themselves are generated by Server software. From this perspective Mapbender is a client software. The client interfaces are generated dynamically by PHP scripts on the Mapbender Server.

User Interface

User interfaces are created using forms of the same web based type. User interfaces contain elements, each has associated HTML attributes, path to PHP modules or JavaScript code which are stored in the database. Basic modules implement:
User interfaces can be started parameterized with a bounding box, set of services and set of activated layers.

Administration Interfaces

Administration interfaces are user interfaces with administration modules. This makes administration highly flexible and multi client capable. Administration modules include management of:
Mapbender is designed to manage loosely coupled web services in a service-oriented architecture. Due to some glitches in early GIS history with Coordinate systems, Cartesian coordinate systems and Surveying this can sometimes be somewhat complex.
The Mapbender software covers the following topics: